ATI has a new "All-In-Wonder" card that has been sweeping "best
of everything" awards from all the trade shows and magazines. It's a
display card that can turn your Windows machine into a TiVo and
more.

The All-in-Wonder X800 XT plugs into an empty slot on a Windows
PC motherboard and can act as a personal video recorder, DVD player,
3D game machine, radio jukebox and video editor. It can tune in 125
channels and you can watch, back-up or pause any of them while the
All-In-Wonder continues to record that or any other program to your
hard drive. You can do the same with FM radio broadcasts. And the
card can automatically convert those to MP3 format and record them
to CD or DVD.

With the built-in TV tuner, you can watch 16 channels at once and
even split them between two monitors. The show can go on while you
do your regular work, by moving the picture to either a small
window, or a full screen display faded in the background. Find out
what's playing and when, using the Gemstar Guide Plus and remote
control, both included. The All-In-Wonder card can convert VHS tapes
to DVDs and you can then use included software to edit the videos
and create special effects.

For pure beautiful display and fast screen drawing, the card has
256 megabytes of video memory and the world's fastest graphics
processing setup. This graphics card is so hot, literally, it comes
with it's own cooling fan. This brings us to a point worth talking
about:

The card is expensive, with a list price $449, but we found it
for $380 at
www.amazon.com. The high price is why you almost never see
something like this in a new computer. But you can plug it into most
existing computers or you can use it as the display card for a new
one built to your own specifications.

You generally don't save money this way but you get to choose the
components. Remember: computer makers often choose components based
on low cost; you don't have to. The end cost for a custom-built is
often only a little more than you would pay for an ordinary
computer. There's a step-by-step tutorial on building your own
computer at PC Magazine
www.pcmag.com and there are books on the subject. The May issue
of of PC World
www.pcworld.com has an article on selecting the best
motherboards. There's also
www.extremetech.com, a web site that covers components for
custom built computers. They list prices and offer recommendations.

Creating a virtual drive

One of the many annoyances of the computer age is the request to
"Please insert the disk" when you want to run a program. Then you
have to figure out what you did with that disk and try not to say
anything really bad in front of the kids. One solution is to load it
all onto your hard drive and never have to look for the disk again.

You can do this with Virtual Drive from FarStone Technology. It
allows you to copy the contents of any CD into a partition it
creates on your hard drive. You can do this many times with many
disks. Since most new computers come with hard drives that have far
more storage capacity than most people use, this seems like a good
thing to do with all that space.

NOTE: Some programs won't let you load their contents onto a hard
disk. They have a programming routine that checks to see if you have
the disk in the CD drive. Presumably this is to prevent illegal
copies, but it's a big nuisance.

Virtual Drive is for Windows, free to try, $40 to buy, from
www.farstone.com. So far, over 10 million users have downloaded
it.

Internuts

--
www.quackwatch.com Alerts and explanations primarily focused on
medicine. (Could there possibly be medical quacks?). Also discusses
questionable health foods, fad diets, needless surgery, dubious
dentistry, etc. They list some "experts" by name, with links to
other articles.
--
www.boundlessgallery.com A gallery of beautiful paintings for
sale. There must be several of these on the web but this one
impressed us for quality and prices. Artists can post their work for
free.
--
www.kaboose.com A search engine for kids. The result for every
search is a site designed for children.

Tech support

We just learned that when you buy some piece of computer
equipment from giant discount house CDW, they will also provide tech
support for that equipment. We have bought from them in the past and
didn't even know this. Our recent tech support experience from
manufacturers has not been good, so we figure the retailer can't be
worse.

SharePoint is a free download for users of "Windows Server 2003."
Server 2003 is an expensive (around $600-$1,000) Microsoft program
that makes one computer able to serve many users. The SharePoint
software then allows many people in a work group to collaborate in
real time on the same document or file, in a web site created
automatically by the program. (You can read a sample chapter of any
book published by O'Reilly by going to their web site.)